The notions of information/noise, communication/meaning, author/literature as a selfregulating machine in Italo Calvino’s Cybernetics and Ghosts (1967) and Thomas Pynchon
The Crying of Lot 49 (1966).
The transition to an information society is determined by the moment in which information work
dominates the work force. This happened in the United States in 1960 where about 30 percent of
employees were information workers.
In the middle of 1940s, Robert Wiener captured the essence of the science of communication
and control coining the term cybernetics: the English pronunciation of the Greek word kubernêtês,
which means steersman. His scientific revolution influenced many sectors of science and technique,
from the environmental science to the modern economic theory, and from the artificial intelligence
to the cognitivism. Besides, cybernetics affected literature and arts across the 1960s on both sides of
the Atlantic.
The influence is evident on two authors’ texts: Italo Calvino’s Cybernetics and Ghosts published
in 1967 and Thomas Phynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 published in 1966.
Quotations:
From Calvino, Italo. “Cybernetics and Ghost.” In The Literature Machine. Trans. Patrick Creagh.
London: Pan/Secker & Warbrug. 1987.
- “Will we have a machine capable of replacing the poet and the author? Will we also have
machines capable of conceiving and composing poems and novels?” (Calvino 1987,12)
- “The work continues to be born, to be judged, to be destroyed or constantly renewed with the
eye of the reader” (Calvino 1987,16)
- “Literature is a combinatorial game that pursues the possibilities implicit of its own material,
independent of the personality of the poet, but it is a game that at a certain point is invested with an
unexpected meaning” (Calvino 1987, 22)
From Porush, David. The Soft Machine: Cybernetic fiction. New York: Methuen. 1985.
- “Cybernetic fiction is a means for the author to present himself or his literature as a soft
machine, a cybernaut-like hybrid device, combining human vulnerability and imagination with
machine-like determinism” (Porush 1985, 22)
From Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. London: Picador. 1966.
- “His voice begins in heavy Slavic tones as second secretary at the Transylvanian Consulate,
looking for an escaped bat; modulated to comic-negro, then on into hostile Pachuco dialect, full of
chingas and maricones; then a Gestapo officer asking her in shrieks did she have relatives in
Germany and finally his Lamont Cranston voice, the one he’d talked in all the way to Mazatlán”
(Pynchon 1966, 6)
- “I’m the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage
is coming out of my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices also” (Pynchon 1966, 54)
From McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw
Hill. 1964.
- “Mental breakdown of varying degrees is the very common result of uprooting and inundation
with new information and endless patterns of information” (McLuhan 1964, 25)
- “Subliminal and docile acceptance of media impact has made them prisons without walls for
their human users” (McLuhan 1964, 29)
- “Cotton and oil, like radio and TV, become ‘fixed charges’ on the entire psychic life of the
community” (McLuhan 1964, 30)
From Klapp, Orrin. Overload and Boredom: Essays on the Quality of Life in the Information
Society. New York: Greenwood Press. 1986.
- “The more information is repeated and duplicated, the larger scale of diffusion, the greater the
speed of processing, the more opinion leaders and gatekeepers and network, the more filtering of
messages, the more kinds of media through which information is passed, the more decoding and
encoding, and so on – the more degraded information might be” (Klapp 1986, 126)
Suggestion for further reading:
Calvino, Italo. “Cybernetics and Ghost.” In The Literature Machine. Trans. Patrick
Creagh. London: Pan/Secker & Warbrug. 1987.
Conway, Flo, and Jim Siegelman. Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener
– Father of Cybernetics. New York: Basic Books. 2004.
Dutta, Anindita. The Paradox of Truth, the Truth of Entropy. 1995.
http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/entropy/paradox.html
Klapp, Orrin. Overload and Boredom: Essays on the Quality of Life in the
Information Society. New York: Greenwood Press. 1986.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man. New York:
McGraw Hill. 1964.
O’Donnell, Patrick, edit. New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49, Cambridge:
University Press. 1991.
Poirer, Richard. Embattled Underground. 1966.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchonlot49.html
Porush, David. The Soft Machine: Cybernetic fiction. New York: Methuen. 1985.
Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. London: Picador. 1966.
Shanken, Edward. “Cybernetics and Art: Cultural Convergence in the 1960s.” In
From Energy to Information. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. 2002.
Straubhaar, Joseph, and Robert LaRose. Media Now. Communications, Media in
the Information Age. Stamford: Instructor’s edition. 2000.
Intensive Seminar in Berlin, September 12-24, 2011
John-F.-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien
Freie Universität Berlin
Instructor: Prof. Dr. Cristina Iuli
Student: Felix Fuchs
Cybernetic Environments:
Space, Users, Functions, and Communication among its Elements
A Short Timeline of Cybernetics and Cybernetic Art:
What constitutes a Cybernetic Environment?
Cybernetics is the study of control and communication. It analyzes the feedback processes in
self-regulating systems like animals and machines and the communication with their
environment. The spatiality of these systems refers not only to actual, physical locations, but
also to social spaces and relationships. Per definition, cybernetic environments surround us,
permeate us and connect all living and dead matter in the universe by way of interaction.
Time and its Function in Cybernetic Cycles: The Feedback Loop and Bergsonian durée
Figure 1: Simple Feedback System1
What is called “Bergsonian Time” is an important concept in cybernetics and basically
describes Henri Bergson‟s “philosophy of flux.”2 Artists such as Roy Ascott experimented with
these ideas of duration (durée) and interaction, inspired by Norbert Wiener‟s cybernetics in
which this duration was an integral part. The American mathematician used the term feedback
to describe loops which “govern present and future actions according to a past set of
meanings.”3
1
Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications (New York:
George Braziller, 1969), 162.
2
Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, “Introduction: Part Two” in From Energy to
Information, Bruce Clarke and Linda Dalrymple, ed. (Stanford, MA: Stanford UP, 2002), 97.
3
David Tomas, “Feedback and Cybernetics: Reimagining the Body in the Age of Cybernetics,” in
Cyberspace, Cyberbodies, Cyberpunk, ed. Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows (London: SAGE Publications,
1995), 28.
Space: There is a dynamic notion of space in cybernetic literature and art.
Example: William Burroughs, Nova Express – Time and space are constructed and
controlled by the power of the word. Burroughs tries to undermine the system language, to
inoculate himself against “the word that begets image and image is virus.”
Users: Every interaction and communication in cybernetics is defined by feedback that
“[governs] present and future actions according to a past set of meanings.”
Example: Cedric Price, The Fun Palace – “But the essence of the place will be its
informality: nothing is obligatory, anything goes. There will be no permanent structures.
Nothing is to last for more than ten years, some things not even ten days […].”4
Functions: Cybernetic environments are defined by their human functions.
Example: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media – “[…] the „message‟ of any medium
or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.
[…] it [the railway] accelerated and enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating
totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure.”5
Important Terms
Cybernetics
(gr. κσβερνήτης: steersman) The interdisciplinary field of control and
communication theory
Homeostasis
A self-regulating system; refers to the regulation of the inner
environment
Feedback
The property of being able to adjust future conduct by past performance;
refers to the relationship between inner and outer environment
Entropy
The measure of disorganization in a system
Cut-Up Method
Writing technique; different texts are “cut-up” and rearranged to form a
new meaning
Bibliography:
Bergson, Henri. 1889. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. London:
George Allen & Company, Ltd., 1913.
Clarke, Bruce, and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, ed. From Energy to Information: Representation in
Science and Technology, Art, and Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
Featherstone, Mike, and Roger Burrows, ed. Cyberspace, Cyberbodies, Cyberpunk: Cultures of
Technological Embodiment. London: SAGE Publications, 1995.
Moore, Nathan. “Nova Law: William S. Burroughs and the Logic of Control.” Law and Literature 19,
No. 3 (2007): 435-470.
Odier, Daniel. The Job: Interview with William Burroughs. London: Jonathan Cape, 1970.
Wiener, Norbert. 1948. Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1965.
4
5
Price, Cedric, and Joan Littlewood, “The Fun Palace,” The Drama Review: TDR 12, No.3 (1968): 130.
McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1965), 8.